Far East Network

FEN (Far East Network) is a group project made up of musicians from Singapore, Japan, China, and Korea who play improvised music. It was first started on the suggestion of globally renowned musician Otomo Yoshihide. Each member is an artist who works individually on the experimental music scene in his respective country. They have been supporting each other's activities by organizing concerts in their own countries, and this relationship became the motivation to form FEN. Currently formed of Otomo Yoshihide, Yan Jun, Yuen Chee Wai & Ryu Hankil.

Otomo Yoshihide

Otomo Yoshihide moves between free jazz, noise, improvisation, composition and the unclassifiable with a generosity that opens up the possibilities for expression in all of the constellations with which he's involved. He spent his teenage years in Fukushima, about 300 kilometers north of Tokyo. Influenced by his father, an engineer, Otomo began making electrical devices such as a radio and an electronic oscillator. In junior high school, his hobby was making sound collages using open-reel tape recorders. This was his first experience creating music. Soon after entering high school he formed a band which played rock and jazz, with Otomo on guitar. It wasn't long, however, before he became a free jazz aficionado, listening to artists like Ornette Coleman, Erick Dolphy and Derek Bailey; and hearing music, both on disk and at concerts, by Japanese free jazz artists. Especially influenced by alto sax player Kaoru Abe and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi, Otomo decided to play free jazz.

In 1990, Otomo started what was to become Ground Zero. Until it disbanded in March 1998, the band was at the core of his musical creativity, while it underwent several changes in style and membership. Since Ground Zero, Otomo has embraced minimal improvisation, film music and the jazz/big band conceptions of his New Jazz Quartet/Quintet/Orchestra.

Ryu Hankil

Ryu Hankil is a computer musician, improviser, and writer based in Seoul.

Ryu Hankil has long explored the possibility of generating another kind of music through non-musical objects. His questions and practice regarding how an object's inherent vibrations can constitute a musical context led him to realize that the speculative power of sonic thinking creates fiction in diverse ways.

To put this understanding into practice, he actively utilizes the feedback between physical modeling synthesis and sonic thinking writing.

He has now shifted his primary focus from non-musical objects to the speculative power of sonic thinking, exploring how sonic thinking can generate different music, function as a new cognitive system, and fundamentally and comprehensively reconfigure today's reality.

Yan Jun

yan jun, a musician and poet based in beijing.
he works on experimental music and improvised music. he uses noise, field recording, body and concept as materials.
sometimes he goes to audience’s home for playing a plastic bag.
“i wish i was a piece of field recording.”
yanjun.org

For this event, Yuko will read this poem by her mum, Kazuko Shiraishi, called ‘ bus stop'. This is the English translation of it:

BUS STOP

On top of the shifting sand     a
Shadow is seeping in like     a dot
It is     a bus stop
No sign telling     from where     to where
There is no one
To     answer     all the questions
Like purpose     and what then     or
Why
Even what is called meaning
Has worn out     and.    in the old     dictionary
Now gritty     and     sticking out a stone tongue     just laughs

(Even the little room inside the brain
The wind     has flown off     somewhere
So . . .)
Saying so
I go out     get on my bike     but     even though I get on
I don't have a destination     but     to go back
Inside, too
That place     also     is a destination that doesn't exist

Maybe     the bus stop.    has come to the door
And might be building a fire
Maybe     the bus stop     with a huge     ancient eye
Like an iguana     might be watching.    passengers
There might be     an angel lying face down like a puppy
Pretending to be asleep

There is Sister Maria who became
A green birthmark simply because she was afraid of committing adultery
Also     sweat-soaked deserters
In dirty combat boots who can't even become devils.    or.    lazy angels
The bus stop     may be     watching     them
Smudging.   in the color of sand
Around the eyes     with the shifting sand
Something that     is     a dot
On the shifting sand!
Certainly existing     that
Phantom existence!

_______
from ‘Let Those Who Appear’, Kazuko Shiraishi
New Directions Publishing
Translated by Samuel Grolmes & Yumiko Tsumura